Pandora's Grave (61 page)

At that moment, the phone in his pocket vibrated and he flipped it open, expecting to hear Carol’s voice.

“Harry, Zakiri’s TACSAT is off-line,” Kranemeyer announced gruffly. “Carol is working to restore the camera network to administrator control.”

“Tell her thanks,” Harry replied. “Is there anything else?”

“One more thing, Harry. This has been an unprecedented breach of security. Understanding how this was accomplished is of primary importance. If at all possible, we need Hamid Zakiri alive. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Harry replied, gazing ahead into the darkness, understanding all too well. He had seen it all before. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have a canister to recover.”

Rising to his feet, he motioned to his companions, his stride steady as he moved down the corridor, the muzzle of his submachine gun sweeping from side to side. On point. In days past, that had been Hamid’s role.

The traitor.
Why
?

Harry knew the answer, knew and it angered him that he had never seen the signs. Hamid, the genial king of the office NFL pool—Hamid, the guy who had given up his pilgrimage to Mecca to watch the Ravens win the Super Bowl—yeah,
that
Hamid had been a jihadist. The man he had recruited. Hamid had killed to cover his trail, for Harry knew now exactly how Harun Larijani had died.

There would be no deals at the end of this road, no pay-offs, no trading freedom for information.

The brotherhood had been betrayed, and this road ended in the grave. The oldest law of mankind.
Lex talionis
. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

He reached the corner and hesitated before going on, nervously checking the sling of his H&K once more. Everything was silent, a silence as cold as the grave.

Abdul Ali and Hossein fanned out behind him, pistols drawn, and Harry rounded the corner wide, the cold, suppressed muzzle of the UMP-45 tracking left to right.

Hamid was gone, the discarded TACSAT lying broken half-way across the adjoining corridor the only proof that he had ever been there. Harry motioned for a halt, his ears straining to pick up the slightest sound.

“Where does the corridor go from here?” he asked quietly, glancing back at Ali.

“To the left, on into the Masjid al-Musalla al-Marwani, the prayer hall of the Stables of Solomon,” the Jordanian replied. “To the right, it continues for about five yards, ending in a dead-end and a platform surmounted by displayed copies of the Quran.”

“Take left, I’ll take right,” Harry instructed. “He may be laying an ambush.”

It’s what they both would have done. Back in the day. In better times, odd as that seemed now.

At Harry’s signal, the three men moved out, Hossein and Ali going left, Harry going right into the dead-ended corridor as they rounded the corner. Empty.

The emptiness struck him with the force of a blow, his mind screaming
danger
as he started to turn. Knowing it was too late even as he did so.

In the narrow limestone corridors, the cough of Hamid’s silenced Glock resounded like thunder, the sound of the slide cycling. One, two shots.

The classic double-tap. Out of the corner of his eye, as if in slow motion, Harry saw Abdul Ali reel backward, blood spraying from a wound in his throat, the pistol falling from his hands.

He turned on heel, hearing the sharp report of the revolver in Hossein’s hands, the ring of steel against stone as Hamid staggered, dropping the canister. The UMP-45 came up to level, Hamid’s face coming into perspective through iron sights.

It was the kill shot. A single press of the trigger would have sent three 230-grain hollowpointed cartridges on their deadly way.

He hesitated. The world seemed to close in, his vision narrowing to a singular focus. His target. Off to his left, Hossein fired another shot, the bullet going wild, the report seeming as distant as a faraway storm. His friend’s face stared back at him through those deathly iron posts, seemingly frozen in time. Disbelief overwhelmed him, the sour taste of bile rising in the back of his throat.

He couldn’t pull the trigger. Moments passed—it could have been hours for all he knew. He saw Hamid, his left arm dangling useless at his side, move backward, toward the sheltering pillars, firing another shot to cover his retreat. Disappearing into the darkness.

Numbly, Harry heard Hossein’s voice, and the mist seemed to clear away. He’d had the shot…

His gaze flickered from Abdul Ali’s lifeless body crumpled on the floor to the canister laying a few feet away. “Disarm the bomb,” he ordered, his throat dry. “I’ll go after him.”

For a moment, Hossein didn’t move and Harry turned on him. “Can you do the job?”

The major’s gaze was unwavering. “Of course. Can
you
?”

Hesitation. It was the killer. Those moments when you paused when you should have kept moving, when you had the shot and failed to take it. It was those moments that killed. And he knew it. Alone now, moving deeper into the passages beneath al-Aqsa, Harry felt his eyes adjust to the darkness. Whether Hamid would lead him to the fourth canister, he knew not. It was like following a wounded tiger into his lair.

The corridor opened out into a large hall, arched pillars extending off as far as Harry could see. He moved slowly, cautiously, listening every few paces.

Sunlight streamed into the center of the room from a window high in the wall, on the southern wall of al-Aqsa if he remembered correctly.

A bullet smacked into the stone beside his head and Harry ducked low, his eyes searching the semi-darkness. A shape, about fifteen yards off, moving behind the pillars.

He knelt down behind a wooden railing partitioning off the worship space, the muzzle of his UMP-45 resting across the carved wood. Waiting, every sense alert, listening for any movement, any sign of his antagonist.

Patience—it had always been one of Hamid’s virtues. One of the things that had made him so valuable to the team. The team that had been torn apart by his treachery. Harry’s lips compressed into a thin line, forcing himself to remember the sight of Davood’s body. There was only one way this could end.

Movement there in the darkness, movement hesitant and uncertain. Harry saw the outline of a gun in the shadows and fired, the suppressed burst sounding like a trio of handclaps in the darkened hall. Applause for a requiem.

11:48 A.M.

The security center

“One more code,” Carol’s voice instructed. Tex cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder, his fingers poised over the keyboard of the security console.

“
Z
as in Zulu-Bravo-India-five-three-Hotel. Enter.”

“Roger that.”

“You should now be in control of the feed. I’m in the network as well, synchronizing our facial-recognition software with the cameras. They’re still using Windows Seven—there’s a couple backdoors in that OS. I used to date a programmer from Redmond.”

The screens around him lit up, the system coming on-line once more—revealing the crowd now gathered outside the mosque. Word from Hossein had confirmed the disarming of the third canister, but they still had one to find, and thousands of people flooding into the area around the masjid. “How soon will we have facial-recognition capabilities?” he asked.

“Five minutes, tops. Why?”

“We’ve got a lot of people to scan.”

11:49 A.M.

Masjid al-Marwani

A moan followed the burst of gunfire, then dead silence. After waiting for a minute, then two, Harry rose and vaulted over the railing, landing noiselessly on the carpet below.

He crouched and moved across the open area, hurrying toward the opposite side of the room.

Still nothing. No suppressed gunshots welcomed his approach, no bullets flew out of the shadows. Submachine gun held at the ready, he rounded one of the pillars and nearly tripped, his eyes fixed ahead of him.

He looked down into the face of his friend, pale and drawn in the semi-darkness.

Hamid lay there on the carpet of the masjid, on his back, his fingers groping toward the butt of the Glock which had fallen from his grasp. There was no sign of his MP-5, presumably discarded after the wound to his arm.

Harry’s final burst had stitched him across the abdomen and pelvis, breaking the pelvic bone. He wasn’t running any further.

Without a word, Harry reached out a foot and kicked the Glock away. Hamid watched the gun spin permanently out of reach, a look of defeat on his face.

Harry looked down upon the crippled body of his friend, remorse and sorrow roiling within him, remembering the good times.

How had it happened? Theirs had been a brotherhood of steel, forged in the fires of battle. Shattered in the space of a moment.

“We need to talk,” Harry said finally, forcing the emotion from his voice as he lowered the H&K, letting the weapon hang from its sling. “Where’s the fourth canister?”

Hamid coughed, blood flecking his cheek. “It was fated to end like this, Harry. There is no escaping the will of Allah.”

“Fate is what we make of it,” Harry responded coldly, drawing the Colt .45 from its holster on his hip. “That’s not answering the question. Where’s the missing canister?”

“I don’t know and there’s nothing you can do about it now. You were ordered to take me alive, weren’t you? I’m sure the Dark Lord is wondering—how did the ayatollahs penetrate his top strike team, how many missions were compromised because of me?”

“How many?”

A smile played on Hamid’s lips. “Azerbaijan will do for an example. It took the Service almost two years to replace the men they lost that winter.”

Taking in the look of anger and surprise on Harry’s face, he went on, wiping away blood from the corner from his mouth. “That’s the way Davood looked.”

“Shut up.” Harry closed his eyes, unable to escape the images burning themselves into his mind, an indelible brand. His own failure had led to this—this unspeakable betrayal.

The Colt trembled angrily in his outstretched hand, a round in the chamber, hammer back. End this…

“He screamed when I shot him, Harry,” the sleeper continued with a laugh. “It was a good sound—I shot him five times, enjoying myself. Just like I’d wanted to do for so long. He died like an unbelieving pig should, wallowing in a mire of his own blood.”

Harry’s face hardened into a cold, pitiless mask. The time for mercy had passed, all chance of redemption gone in that moment.

“Burn,” he whispered bitterly, his finger tightening around the trigger. Judge and jury were gone, leaving only the last of the offices for him to perform.

Executioner…

The hammer came down, the pistol recoiling into Harry’s hand as the mighty roar of the Colt reverberated through the stone galleries.

Hamid’s head snapped back at the impact of the round, the sneer on his face forever wiped away.

Harry stood there for a moment, the gun still leveled, looking down at the broken body of his friend, the blood staining the carpet. And it all came back, the emotion surging over him in a flood tide.

That it would have ended like this. He leaned against the pillar, his stomach convulsed in dry heaves, trying to vomit. Nothing could wash away the vile taste in his mouth. The blood on his hands.

A voice penetrated his consciousness, echoing in the dark chambers of his mind. He turned to see Hossein standing there about ten feet away.

He took in the major’s face, saw the revolver shoved into his waistband, and in that moment an image washed over him. Sergeant Major Juan Delgado’s headless, mutilated corpse. Floating in the Euphrates.

The Colt came up one more time. He saw the look of shock on Hossein’s face, saw his lips move, heard his voice in protest as if in a dream.

“I thought we had a deal.”

His own voice, a remorseless response. “Your deal was with Langley, not with me.”

And he fired, and fired—Hossein’s body reeling backward under the impact of the bullets, and fired until the Colt’s slide locked back on an empty magazine and he could fire no more…

11:53 A.M.

The security center

“What are your CPU usage levels?”

The TACSAT pressed to his ear, Tex pulled up a screen on the security console. “Sixty-five percent and climbing.”

“That’s not good,” Carol replied, worry in her voice. “If the usage of the recognition software goes over eighty percent, you’re going to start experiencing problems.”

“Such as?”

“The network is built to handle the data load of streaming video, but we just added our software on top of that. You might start experiencing black-outs from certain screens, it might crash the system altogether.”

“Seventy percent now.”

“We can dial back the speed of the search,” she added. “That would reduce the load on the central processing unit.”

“How much longer would that take? We’re at seventy-two percent.”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

The big man shook his head grimly. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Are any of Husayni’s people in the room with you?”

“Negative, they’re in the next room over at the moment. Why?”

“Well, if the Mufti’s security service starts having to investigate mainframe glitches, they’re going to realize we piggy-backed onto their system. You can’t hide software like this forever.” Carol cleared her throat. “That is not desirable.”

“Desirability be hanged,” Tex snarled. “We’re going to red-line this thing.”

Images flickered across the screen as the software sped about its business, searching through the assembled crowd. Usage creeping to seventy-six percent.

It was a dangerous gamble, but none of the other choices were viable. The Texan knew that. If there were known terrorists in the crowd, they needed to know it, in the next few minutes if at all possible.

Seventy-nine percent. A screen above Tex’s head to the left flickered and went black, losing its signal. Losing his coverage of the al-Magribah gate, he realized, mentally reviewing the data before him.